The Land of Frozen Suns: A Novel

THE LAND OF FROZEN SUNS
A Novel
BERTRAND W. SINCLAIR
Author of “Raw Gold,” Etc.
Copyright 1909, BY
STREET & SMITH.
Copyright, 1910, BY
G. W. DILLINGHAM COMPANY.
The Land of Frozen Suns.
Made in U. S. A.
Who was it, I wonder, made that sagacious remark about the road to hell being paved with good intentions? He might have added an amendment to the effect that there’s always a plentiful supply of material for that much travelled highway. We all contribute, more or less. I know I have done so. And so did my people before me. My father’s intentions were good, but he didn’t live long enough to carry them out. If he hadn’t fallen a victim to an inborn streak of recklessness, a habit of taking chances,—well, I can’t say just how things would have panned out. I’m not fatalist enough to believe that we crawl or run or soar through our allotted span of years according to some prearranged scheme which we are powerless to modify. Oh, no! It’s highly probable, however, that if my father and mother had lived I should have gone into some commercial pursuit or taken up one of the professions. Either way, I should likely have pegged along in an uneventful sort of way to the end of the chapter—lots of men do. Not that I would have taken with enthusiasm to chasing the nimble dollar for the pure love of catching it, but because I was slated for something of the sort, and as the twig is bent so is the tree inclined; a man can’t sit down and twiddle his thumbs and refuse to perform any useful act, because there is no glory in it. The heroic age has gone a-glimmering down the corridors of time.
As it happened, my feet were set in other paths by force of circumstances. Only for that the sage-brush country, the very place where I was born might have remained a terra incognita. I should always have felt, though, that I’d missed something, for I was ushered into this vale of tears at the Summer ranch on the Red River of the South. Sumner here hadn’t developed into a cow monarch those days, but he was on the way. My earliest impressions were all of log and ’dobe buildings, of long-horned cattle , of wild, shaggy-maned horses, and of wilder men who rode the one and drove the other in masterly fashion. For landscape there was rolling prairie, and more rolling prairie beyond; and here and there the eternal brown of it was broken by gray sage-grown flats and stretches of greasewood—as if Nature had made a feeble effort to break the monotony. I knew only this until I was big enough to tease for a pony. I cannot remember seeing a town when I was small. The world to me was a place of great plains, very still, and hot, and dry, a huddle of cabins, and corrals, and a little way to the south Red River slinking over its quicksands—except in time of storm; then it raged.